EAR|EYE: Listening and Looking – Contemporary Music and Art will pair Bisa Butler’s The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake with a work for solo piano by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis.
The event will be streamed Friday, Dec. 11, at youtube.com/bgsumusic.
Pianist Humay Gasimzadeh will perform Davis’s A Walk Through the Shadow in a film produced by Ryan Ebright with recording engineer and videographer Michael Laurello and photographer Collin Stegeman.
the Whirlwind, and
the Earthquake
(TMA Photo)
Butler’s quilt The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake is a portrait of abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass as a young man. It was recently purchased by the Toledo Museum of Art and is a centerpiece of the current exhibit “Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change.”
In his program notes, Ebright writes: “The American composer Anthony Davis is best known today for his politically and socially engaged operas on subjects ranging from the 1839 rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad to the 1970s kidnapping and radicalization of Patty Hearst. His latest opera, The Central Park Five, received this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music.
“Before composing for the stage, however, Davis was better known as an improvising pianist and composer in downtown New York City, where in the early 1980s he led a small ensemble called Episteme that specialized in performing Davis’s partly notated, partly improvised music. A Walk Through the Shadow, based on the 23rd Psalm, was composed in 1981, the same year in which the composer’s father passed away. In it, Davis cycles through a series of four sustained, arpeggiated chords whose contrasting harmonies create a dark-hued but meditative atmosphere. Within this sonic environment, the pianist interweaves a wandering, lyrical melody
“The spiritual nature of A Walk Through the Shadow led Davis to incorporate it into his first opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986. The piece serves as the musical basis for Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca in the third act. We might think of this music, then, as one of the threads or fabrics with which Davis constructs his operatic portrait of Malcolm X, in the same way that Bisa Butler creates a portrait of Frederick Douglass out of bold, evocative colors and patterns.”
Launched in September 2015, EAR|EYE: Listening and Looking – Contemporary Music and Art is a partnership of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Doctoral Program of the College of Musical Arts, Bowling Green State University. An article in arTMAtters states that the series “explores the relationship between the music and art of today through performances in front of contemporary works of art . . . intertwining elements of visual and musical literacy in our increasingly multi-sensory world.”
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, pianist Humay Gasimzadeh is a student in the contemporary music doctoral program at Bowling Green State University’s College of Musical Arts.
